It is 1971, Turkey is in the throes of a military coup and a group of radical young students, the children of American diplomats as well as affluent Turks, is accused of chopping up a university tutor named Dutch Harding. The gruesome murder at the centre of Enlightenment will reverberate through the lives of the central characters for more than three decades, but were the students guilty, did the killing actually take place, and was there even such a person as Dutch Harding to begin with?

Nothing that occurs in this shadowy Istanbul is to be taken at face value, as the narrator, M, and her subjects, two well-meaning but naive American women abroad, discover. That their story, a chronicle of obfuscation and misunderstanding, unfolds within a book called Enlightenment is an intentional irony. But this novel can't bear the weight of its own mysteries.

Thirty-four years on from the alleged murder and one of the men implicated in it, Sinan Sinanoglu, now a respected film-maker, is being held as a terrorist at US customs. News of his arrest prompts our narrator to revisit Istanbul and the events of 1971. Sinan was M's teenage sweetheart when her family lived in Turkey and now, at the behest of Sinan's wife, a fellow American named Jeannie, she sets out to clear his name.

What ensues is a cautionary tale about the dangers of meddling in the affairs of a culture beyond one's comprehension. The country described here in fine detail will be immediately recognisable to readers of Orhan Pamuk, whose books Freely has translated. An irreducibly complex state torn between the lure of the West and the grip of the East, Turkey, in Freely's analysis, is a society that can never be truly understood by outsiders. This, I imagine, is what has inspired the author to make the story so convoluted.

Characters go to fantastical lengths to confuse, deceive and misdirect. Revelations are promised and deferred with such regularity that only the most tolerant of readers could approach the final pages caring to know who did (or did not do) what to whom and why.